


angles

by kagamiwa



Category: Day6 (Band), Wonder Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:14:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23698303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kagamiwa/pseuds/kagamiwa
Summary: Two new sounds mix in over the drums: a squawk of surprise from Jae as he freezes mid air-guitar solo on the bed, and a yelp of horror from Hyerim when she realizes that he’s shirtless.(cw: body dysmorphia)
Relationships: Park Jaehyung | Jae/Woo Hyerim | Lim
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25





	angles

**Author's Note:**

> part of this fic was a note on my phone from may 2019 and I can't remember how or why it ended up there but ellie rejected my offer to give it to her so I decided to finish it (haha love you ellie). also I've forgotten how to write fic, I am sorry

Jae had suggested they meet at his dorm before heading out for dinner, but judging from the way a screechy guitar solo leaks around the edges of the door he probably isn’t ready yet. Hyerim knocks once, twice. The music plays on. Growing up with two equally rambunctious brothers (with equally selective hearing) she’d learned early on that two insistent warning knocks was the universal code before entering a boy’s room, so she puts her hand on the doorknob and wrenches the door open.

Two new sounds mix in over the drums: a squawk of surprise from Jae as he freezes mid air-guitar solo on the bed, and a yelp of horror from Hyerim when she realizes that he’s shirtless.

It only lasts a second. Jae’s skin is milky white, a faint tan cutting a clear divide across his upper arms. He’s almost pitifully thin, his ribs creating ripples of shadow across his skin where the ceiling light catches it. What Hyerim notices most, though, are the tattoos littering his forearms – which she’s caught glimpses of before – and those flanking his collarbones and cascading down his shoulders and upper arms, which she hasn’t. Hyerim has seen plenty of naked bodies from one and a half consecutive years of life drawing, but is the first time she’s ever frozen up at the sight of one.

“Oh my God, Hyerim!” Jae throws himself down on the covers and rolls himself up hastily. Hyerim backs out of the room just as swiftly and closes the door behind her. Of all the nasty things she’d had to witness from walking in on her brothers, catching them shirtless was a daily norm, but she’s very aware that Jae is not her brother.

When he finally opens the door clad in his usual baggy black t-shirt and denim jacket, Hyerim notices the extra tousledness of his hair, as if he’d put on and taken off several outfits. He clears his throat. “Well… you know, if you wanted to see me naked you could’ve just asked.” He runs a hand through his hair with a sheepish grin, not quite able to meet her eyes.

“I did knock twice,” Hyerim says by way of apology.

He waves her off. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s… is pizza okay?”

He strides off down the corridor, a tall dark beanstalk with a head of pure light, and Hyerim follows, watching the angular sway of his shoulders and imagining the black ink peeling from his skin in great black wings to carry him away.

Jae drinks more than usual at dinner, which is a surprise to Hyerim because even though they’ve been friends since the start of college she has never actually seen him drunk. They’ve only been to a handful of parties together, since psychology and fine art students don’t generally mix together, and in those few times Jae has always skulked in dark corners alone while she alternates between dancing with her friends and hanging on couches with him.

Still, she tries to drink just as much as he does, even if she’s still a bottle behind, if only just to try and push just a little past the wall he’s put up around him. She can see it in the hunch of his shoulders, in the steadfast way he avoids looking at her too long in the eyes. She can hear it in the slightly maniacal pitch in his laugh. To an untrained eye Jae is just another awkward, gangly college student who tries a little too hard sometimes and lives with his head in the clouds. To Hyerim, who has spent most of her college life trying her best to interpret meaning in the energy of brush strokes and the precise lines of the human body, Jae is a challenge. Even with all the details right there under her nose, what he’s trying to express always just slips right through her fingertips. And it’s always intentional.

“Are you alright?” she asks when he slams his third beer of the night on the table and orders another.

Jae eyes her warily. Summer still hasn’t properly announced its arrival, but tonight is particularly warm and in a small restaurant packed with students laughing and collectively getting drunk, the air is suffocating. In his tipsy state Jae has already shrugged off his jacket, forearm tattoos on full display. Hyerim tries not to stare, but she can’t help glancing back every now and then at the outline of the snake coiling from the inside of his arm to his wrist. The warm yellow lighting of the shop just makes everything seem even warmer. Hyerim feels a sudden urge to pour a whole bottle of beer over herself just to get some respite, but that might just be the alcohol talking.

“What you saw just now… just forget it,” he finally says. His cheeks burn a blotchy red. An angry flush creeps its way up his neck, although that could just be the alcohol too. The fresh drinks arrive, already condensing in the humidity, and he cracks one open and slides it towards her.

“About seeing you shirtless? I thought you said if I wanted to see you naked I could just ask,” Hyerim says lightly. She tries to take the bottle but Jae holds on to it steadfastedly.

“I was joking,” he says evenly. “I don’t like people looking at my body.”

“Then why the tattoos?” the alcohol blurts out before she can stop it.

His expression falters. Jae either smiles with all his heart or none of it, and this is the longest time he hasn’t smiled at all. “I dunno, it’s like your paintings isn’t it?” he says half to himself, but she hears it. “Like… when you don’t like something… when you see a mistake… you cover it up.”

Under the light, Jae’s glasses glint and his bleach blond hair glows golden. Dazzling, just like how she has always thought he is. Hyerim is not in love with him in the conventional sense; in fact she isn’t in love with him at all. Rather, she loves the shadows in the hollows of his cheekbones, the lines of his ankles beneath his rolled up jeans, that particularly sharp bone in his shoulders that jabs into her whenever he leans against her. For years Hyerim has been itching to draw him but has never worked up the courage to ask him, has never thought herself good enough to capture all the outlines and harsh angles that make him up. Now she wishes he would let her, if only just to show him how _she_ sees him. A masterful, well balanced composition of bright smiles and dark disposition.

“Maybe,” she says instead, taking the beer bottle from Jae’s slack fingers. “But sometimes mistakes turn out to be the things that turn something decent into a masterpiece.”

Beyond the glass windows, Hyerim can see the street sleek and shining. It must be raining. If she listens carefully enough she can hear the tyres of passing cars hissing across the asphalt. Even now the streetlights are fuzzy orbs of white in a dark night. Around them, the rough clinks of cutlery on porcelain plates, of glass bottles slammed on to tables. Of raucous, uninhibited laughter. Jae takes the last slice of pizza. Hyerim follows the edges of his arms as he moves, stark against the black backdrop of his t-shirt. Her third bottle of beer is half empty.

“Can I draw you?” she asks. She knows the answer even before she’s asked it.

“No,” says Jae.

“Okay,” she says.

Hyerim adjusts herself slightly when she feels her dress sticking to her skin. Her fingers thumb through the novel, but she’s only half concentrating on the words. The other half of her concentration is on the weight of Jae’s head on the edge of her hipbone as he lies on his back on the towel he laughingly called his picnic rug, rapidly clicking away on the gaming console in his hands. The humidity feels almost oppressive, and Hyerim’s skirt feels damp under Jae’s hair.

“I wonder why we never did this before,” she muses, watching her friends on the grass waving giant bubble wands through the air and laughing everytime somebody fails to complete a bubble. “This is the first summer we actually spent together huh?”

“That’s because I go back to California and you go back to Hong Kong,” Jae points out. He shifts into a more comfortable position off her bone and on to her thigh and she looks down at him. There isn’t anything inherently romantic about any of this, about her or Jae or even the thought of her and Jae. That’s always something she’s liked about Jae; his ability to casually touch her and have it mean nothing. But something has always bothered her and that’s –

She lifts a hand and places it on his forehead. Jae immediately shies out of her reach and off her leg.

“Ack, Hyerim, you just made me lose!” he huffs, as naturally as if nothing had just happened. He rolls over on to his stomach, away from her, and resumes tapping. Because it’s a known fact, established early on in their friendship: Jae hates being touched, especially on his bare skin. He’d happily lean his head on her covered shoulder or drape his legs over hers when they’re watching a movie but if she ever so much as tap the back of his hand he’d recoil into himself.

“We should go to the beach,” she says, watching one of the guys tackle another to the ground.

Jae makes a sound that sounds like a cross between a scoff and a grunt. Hyerim looks at the curve of his spine beneath his t-shirt and overshirt (he never wears just t-shirts in public) and turns to flop on to her back, resting her head on his back. He visibly stiffens.

“I only go swimming at night,” he says stiffly.

“Good,” she replies. “I like less people around too.”

“We’re not going.”

“Okay.” And she means it.

Jae returns to his game. Listening to the mechanical clacking of his buttons, Hyerim closes her eyes. Beneath her head, Jae relaxes enough that she can feel herself sinking into the earth. His back is bony and sharp, angles digging into her skull. She doesn’t mind, though. It reminds her that even beneath all the tattoos and self-hatred and tangled thoughts Jae is still human. Her thoughts turn from the snake curling on the inside of his right arm to the glimpses of the stylized, shattering skull on his left bicep with red lines reaching down past his elbow and the open black doorway positioned right in the middle of his pale chest. Jae either smiles with all his heart or none at all, but behind that black doorway, beneath his bones, she knows his heart is always there, beating away.

“How any tattoos do you have?” she wonders out loud.

“Too many to count,” he replies, distracted.

“Maybe I could draw one for you.”

It’s a spur of the moment. Jae tenses again. She waits for him to outright refuse. It’s a sort of game they’ve been playing since they met, where Hyerim suggests things she knows he’ll never do and he doesn’t let her down. But instead, Jae relaxes. “Maybe,” he says, and goes back to playing. She knows, from the curve of his shoulders and the angle of his neck, that he’s smiling. She closes her eyes again and tries to stop interpreting what it means.

Towards the end of summer vacation, Jae unexpectedly invites her to a party. (“I don’t really want to go, it’s just that it’s Brian’s birthday and he’s always been an over the top kind of guy and they’re expecting me to come but I don’t think I’ll survive without y… anyway, uhh, please come with me. Please?”) On the train ride there Hyerim keeps her usual cool, composed head on her shoulders. Jae has his light cotton overshirt on again.

“They have a pool even though his parents’ house is right next to the beach,” he tells her, shaking his head at the fortunes of richer people. Hyerim now knows why he wanted her to come along with him. “Uhh, I have a favour to ask from you.”

“You want me to punch anyone who tries to take your shirt off?” she guesses casually. “I mean, it’s been a while since I practiced taekwondo but I’m not averse to the idea, I guess.”

Jae’s laugh is explosive, uninhibited. It’s blinding. The whole carriage turns to look at them. He instantly turns beetroot red. “Well, I mean I was thinking more like pushing them into the pool themselves or saying you have urgent business with me instead but if you want to kick ass I’m not going to stop you.” He chuckles.

It’s immensely gratifying. Hyerim spends the rest of the train journey wondering how to translate an explosion of light into something that can be tattooed in black ink on skin.

The party is chaos. In between narrowly avoiding getting drinks spilt on her, Jae’s over the top friend Brian divebombing into the pool and thoroughly splashing everyone in the vicinity and walking in on several people making out in bathrooms she’s just trying to _go_ in, Hyerim narrowly saves Jae twice and then proceeds to lose him in the crowd thronging the poolside and spilling out around the barbecue area.

“Jae? Yeah, I saw him walking down to the beach,” one of Jae’s friends (Sungjin, she thinks she hears him say) yells into her ear, and she locates the rocky path with a little difficulty. With each step the party recedes just a little more into the background. She spots him easily on the deserted sliver of a beach, and takes her sandals off to feel the sand soft and only slightly warm under her feet. The party is just muffled bass beats behind her now.

“You weren’t kidding when you said your friends were crazy,” she remarks as she sits down beside him. He looks at her as if he hadn’t expected her to come, then back out over the water. “Imagine being able to see this every night,” she adds, leaning backwards and digging her fingers into the sand as the sky stretches on as far as they can see, stars twinkling gently out in space. Even though its significantly cooler than the day, the air still sticks to them. Hyerim looks at Jae, and notices that he’s taken off his overshirt, long thin legs splayed out in front of him. His arms are as pale as the moonlight in the water.

“So how did I do keeping you fully clothed? Think you’ll hire me as a permanent bodyguard?”

He turns to her with a no-heart grin. Under the moon, his hair is silver. There’s no colour left on him now. Something in her chest clenches. “I’ll keep you around, sure. Just wish they’d realize that having the clothes on is better than what’s underneath.”

“Why do you hate your body so much?” She’s genuinely curious. “No pressure or anything, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” she adds quickly.

Jae folds his legs and hugs his knees to his chest. “Well, just look,” he holds out an arm. Even in the gloom the snake on his pale skin seems to glow. “I’ve never seen anything that looks less like an arm in my life. It’s uncooked pasta as far as I can tell. When I look in the mirror… don’t I look like an alien or something? It’s just skin and bones. I’m a walking corpse. You know, when I was a kid and we were changing for sports I remember I made another kid cry when he saw my spine. It’s pretty disgusting.” He laughs lightly, but they don’t disguise the darkness behind his words.

Hyerim gets up, brushing sand from her skirt. “Get up,” she says, holding her hand out to him. He stares at her, and she looks around. Grabbing up her bag, she holds it out. “Okay, hold this if you don’t want to touch me.” Jae reaches up obediently and she yanks him to his feet. She leads him to the waters’ edge where the waves lap easily over her toes. Turns and looks at him. “Let’s go for a swim.”

“We’ll get wet,” Jae says, like that isn’t obvious. She lets go of the bag and wades out until the water pools around her knees, then turns to look back at him.

“Come on!” she yells, and splashes some water at him. She laughs. “And don’t get my bag wet!” Jae tosses the bag back on to the sand and rolls his pants up, laughing as he splashes her back. He’s so tall that the water doesn’t even reach his knees when he finally makes it to her, moisture glistening in his hair. He stumbles slightly in an unexpected drop in the sand, and reaches out to steady himself on her bare shoulder. Hyerim catches his arm as he freezes.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, pulling away. “Sorry, Hyerim.”

“It’s okay, Jae. I don’t think you’re disgusting,” she says, looking up at him. She can’t really see his eyes behind his glasses but that’s okay too. “Look, I can see your arms and legs now. I even saw you shirtless once,” she laughs, “and I’m still here. Because you’re not a monster, or an alien, or a corpse or anything like that. You’re you. You try to hide behind tattoos and clothes but this body is you too. And don’t get me wrong, I like your tattoos, they’re a part of who you are now, but I wish you’d appreciate your body more. I wish you’d see yourself through a better lens, because you deserve that much.”

Jae doesn’t say anything. Droplets of water run down his arm where she splashed him, cutting a sharp shape against the backdrop of the universe behind him. Hyerim can’t see all the details in the gloom, but she can tell enough from just his silhouette. Jae might be a perfect balance of bright smiles and dark disposition, but things can’t stay balanced forever. Sometimes the scales tip. Sometimes one side is just that much stronger than the other. What bothers her is that she can’t tell which side it’ll tip to.

“Sorry,” she says finally. “It’s really none of my business.” She looks out over the water. It’s the same feeling as all these years of wanting to draw him. It’s the difference between wanting to do something and knowing that you just wouldn’t be able to. She would love to save Jae from himself, if even just a little, but she’d already known that it wasn’t her place to do so. Just like always, he’d never let her.

“No,” Jae moves a little closer to her. The water swirls around her knees, wetting the hem of her skirt. “Thanks. Thanks, Hyerim.” And unexpectedly, he pats her tentatively on the head once, twice. She stares up at him, shocked by the lingering weight of his hand on her hair. He looks back down at her, and smiles. It’s bright, brighter than the moon behind him. Jae has two smiles; one full of heart and other with none at all, and in this one Hyerim knows which side the scales will angle towards when they finally begin to tip.

“So… you said you wanted to draw me…”

Hyerim smiles back easily. Maybe she can do this after all. “It’ll just be your face,” she promises. “Are you free tomorrow?”

Jae’s smile widens. Hyerim takes it as a yes.


End file.
